In the Garage with “Holy Motors”

Writing ecstatically about an ecstatic movie, it’s easy to get carried away—to see most clearly what sparks the most intense emotion—and one of those things in the viewing of Leos Carax’s “Holy Motors” is the impulsive vigor of the filming: the tone of spontaneous invention, creative urgency, documentary curiosity. In fact, that’s its very subject: it’s one of the deepest, truest, and wisest films ever made about the passions and perils of making films. It’s centered on an actor, Oscar (Denis Lavant), who prepares in a stretch limousine for performances that he delivers on-location in Paris. Of course, a movie that depends so crucially on makeup and costume—as well as on décor, live musical performance, choreography, simulations of violence, and, for that matter, digital effects—is also the work of meticulous preparation.

Many of the ostensible masterworks of cinematic realism rely on sets, rear-screen projections, miniatures, painted backdrops, double exposures, and, in the modern era, C.G.I. “Holy Motors” blends its agile and streetwise cinematography and sense of impulsive, irrepressible creation with exquisite artifice—which is inseparable from the passions and perils involved in the making of Carax’s own film, as is revealed in “DRIVE IN Holy Motors,” a remarkable making-of documentary directed by Tessa Louise-Salomé (who, in the interest of full disclosure, has interviewed me for a forthcoming project) that I’ve had the pleasure and privilege of viewing as a work in progress.

Present during the shoot, Salomé catches exacting and inspiring moments of the production and adds interviews with its main participants (the actors Lavant, &#201dith Scob, and Kylie Minogue, and the cinematographer, Caroline Champetier) as well as a brief but revealing onscreen transcript of remarks by Carax, who describes his filming of the early scene, in which Lavant portrays an elderly beggar woman—who is filmed, documentary-style, among passersby, on a quai of the Seine. The character is based on people whom Carax observed in Paris:

Once I had considered making a documentary about one of them, or rather, on the world that separates us, them from me. But if I have been often tempted by documentary, I’ve always been afraid that the realization of just one would take my whole life. So I then imagined that beggar as the absolute fictional character.

The “absolute fictional character” becomes the subject of documentary filming, whereas (as Salomé shows) much of the through-line of Oscar’s preparation inside the limousine for his on-location roles was filmed in a studio by means of classic movie tricks. For many of these scenes, Carax used a cutaway limousine fixed in place in a studio, and the city views that streamed in through the rear windows are rear-screen projections. Champetier said that Carax “wanted something that wasn’t totally realistic—that was a little ‘interpreted.’” In order to convey the idea of a space that corresponded to Oscar’s teeming imagination, they created “an imaginary space,” one that “couldn’t be entirely realistic” even if, as it plays onscreen, there’s nothing obviously impossible about it.

The movie, Lavant says, originated in a short film that never got made and that was, in fact, to be called “Actor.” And the idea that “Holy Motors” conveys, of an actor who is himself radically transformed by his roles, is exactly what Lavant himself experienced as he donned his elaborate makeup and costumes for those roles:

In the process of seeing myself transform myself … I used those moments to examine myself and to see, in the course of the process, how that reverberated onto me.

For Lavant, the roles weren’t mimicry—“It isn’t a matter of aping a character but of plunging into a moment of humanity”—and added that, despite the “physical risks” that the film entailed, his main experience in the course of the shoot was “jubilation, simply the pleasure of acting.” One of those pleasures is the revisiting of his own cinematic trajectory, which began with Carax in the early eighties, as in the scene that’s set in the empty shell of the former Samaritaine department store, a major scenic element in Carax’s “The Lovers on the Bridge,” from 1991, co-starring Lavant and Juliette Binoche. Lavant explains that “at first, Leos had written the role for Juliette Binoche as a recollection of ‘The Lovers,’ … as a thing that was carried by the past we had had together.” But when Binoche turned it down, Carax replaced her with Kylie Minogue (whose song “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” is heard earlier on the soundtrack) and co-wrote a song for her, which she performs, live on-camera (to a pre-recorded orchestral track), in the ruins of the store. (Dennis Lim reported in the Times that permission to shoot there was “only granted after some string-pulling from Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, an old flame,” who was also, at the time, France’s First Lady.)

“Holy Motors” dramatizes the expansion of imagination, of life itself, by way of cinematic creation—and the connection of this creation to power. Oscar doesn’t pick his roles; he receives his mini-scripts in the back seat of the limousine and is driven by his assistant, Madame Céline (Scob), to the locations where he performs. His work is decided by the Man, overseen by the Man, paid by the Man—but without the Man, there would be no pay and no budget, and the scope of the imaginative enterprise would become entirely narrower, for the performers as well as for the viewer. Oscar finds, and Carax reveals, a “moment of humanity” in even the most stereotypical genre clichés; their dedication de-alienates the formulaic and the mercenary. Money and the cinema—the grand cinema of the grand tradition, the one that pulls Oscar in and subjects him and the viewer to vertiginous, soul-stirring transformations—are inextricably, diabolically connected, and the movie concludes with a vision that suggests its looming obsolescence.

Oscar’s untransformed identity, the ground state of his being, exists only within the confines of the limousine, in the presence solely of his colleagues in the business, Céline and their boss, the mysterious grandee played by Michel Piccoli. That true self is unavailable to the public or even to the family—for whom Oscar is always and ever a fictitious character. When Céline parks the limousine for the night and heads for her private life, she dons a mask like the one that Scob wore in Georges Franju’s 1959 movie “Eyes Without a Face.” It’s only in the hermetic realm of the cinema that movie people are themselves, and “Holy Motors” sends viewers off with the question of what—in the absence of the radical contrast between the sanctuary of the cinematic order and the transformations of adopted public faces—will be left of the cinema, and of people who derive from it their identities, their very being. Carax has put Homo cinematicus on the list of endangered species. It&#8217s a species of which he’s a member, and, in “DRIVE IN,” Salomé observes him in his most unnatural natural habitat.

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